The Conundrum of Lucian Freud’s Portraits
“You’ll be dead very soon and I want you to do naked self-portraits and put in everything you feel is relevant to your life and how you think about yourself … Try and make it the most revealing, telling, and believable object … Make a visual statement and forget your inhibitions and be over the top. Take your clothes off and paint yourself. Just once.”
According to Lucian Freud, this is a talk he addressed to students of a life-painting course at the Norwich School of Art in 1964. The episode is only briefly described at the end of William Feaver’s first volume of the artist’s biography——yet it is illustrative of Freud as both person and painter. Freud was notoriously impassioned (he had at least 14 children), utterly against convention, ruthless in his portrayal of self and subject, and possessed of a lifelong goal, as he put it, to “shock and amaze.” These traits were in stark contrast to his students at Norwich, in whom he saw an “innate timidity of a very agreeable kind but the antithesis, really, to
